Zaccone, Pierre — Mystères de la Chine

Paris A. Fayard Half leather binding, 28 cm, 480 pp. Ills.: black and white illustrations. Extra spine title: Les pavillions noirs. Pierre Zaccone wrote Les Mystères de la Chine in 1860. By the time the book was serialized in 1883, France's situation in Indochina had become more precarious. The Pavillons Noirs ("The Black Flags") was a mercenary and bandit army that formed in the 1860s and swelled to great numbers in the 1870s. The Black Flags fought with the Vietnamese and the Chinese against the French, quite successfully at times, and their skirmishes and battles ultimately led to the Sino-French War in 1884. As in the case of horror movie posters from the following century, this poster aims to stimulate the primal fear of the French public, portraying a terrifying enemy of France, a savage Asian warrior making off with a Western woman. Cond.: goed / good.